Friday, November 30, 2012

I've spotted a trojan/shell exploit that targets ASP.NET named ASPY.a making the rounds again recently. By no means a 0-day or brand new bit of malware, ASPY.a has been around for about 2 years. It takes advantage of vulnerable ASP scripts, uploads itself to a web server and in unpatched systems that lack sensible permissions policies and the latest updates, it can grant remote attackers administrator access. Microsoft Security Essentials will catch it, however I've seen at least one version of Symantec that does not completely remove compromised files - with Symantec server-level compromise was prevented, but the website itself remained controllable.

So why am I writing a post about a 2 year old piece of malware? The story here is that the circulation appears to be driven by a developer based in Russia that sells "server control panel" (панель управления сервером, управление) software for novices tasked with IIS-based website management. The name of the company is ISPserver, the software is named ISPmanager (I would stay far away from their website). If you are seeing html and asp/cs files with lines saying "Created by ISP manager 151515" its time to strip permissions from those files and run an antivirus.

About Me

Joshua Wieder has been a systems administrator for close to 10 years - specializing in data center and hosting infrastructure using redhat linux, cisco ios, vmware, KVM and containers such as docker and kubernetes. Get in touch with Josh Wieder here on Google+ or using one of the websites on the links page.